This application relates to reducing linearity degradation in delay lines and, more particularly, to dynamic element matching of delay line components.
A Time to Digital converter (TDC) is used for converting a signal of sporadic pulses into a digital representation of their time indices. In other words, a TDC is used to output the time of arrival for each incoming pulse. Because the magnitudes of the pulses are not usually measured, a TDC is used when the important information is to be found in the timing of events. The performance of the TDC depends on the accuracy of a delay of delay elements in the TDC. In practice, the variations of the delay elements are quite high due to process deviations and temperature variations resulting in system performance degradations.